Meet Skyler!

Meet Skyler and his mom Crystal!  I wish I could put into words the amount of love I have for our next featured family.  I mean, I truly love each of our featured families, but this was a family who was diagnosed just one week after my Cami.  They had the same diagnosis, they were in the same hospital, had the same Doctors, and they were both put on the same treatment plan.  Unfortunately, Skyler's battle was much more difficult...



Read his story (written by his amazing mom, Crystal):

By the summer of 2010 I thought I knew was heartache was.  My little boy had been sick on and off most of his life with chronic ear infections and croup.  It seemed that Skyler could not go longer than 5 weeks without getting croup which meant alot of ER trips, steriods and breathing treatments.  And during the summer of 2010 he even underwent two surgeries to remove a mass off of his jaw.  To top it off I lost my husband, Skyler's daddy, a couple years before to a heart tumor.  That was such a tough and painful time of my life, but nothing can ever compare to the pure pain, sadness and heartache I felt when the doctors told me that my sweet innocent little boy had cancer.  My world stopped at that moment and came crashing down around me.  As a mother nothing is worse than having to watch your child suffer and know that there is nothing you can do to make it better.

August 17th 2010 was the start of a new life for us.  A life filled with doctors, hospitals, pokes, pain and alot of tears.  That was the day Skyler was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.  He was supposed to spend a week inpatient getting chemo and then spend the next three and a half years getting outpatient chemo, but that one week turned into five long months inpatient.  Most of those months were spent in the pediatric ICU on life support in a medically induced coma.  Everything that could go wrong did.  Skyler soon developed tumor lysis which completely shut down his kidneys putting him in renal failure and on dialysis.  He also developed an invasive fungal infection that started out in his sinuses and soon spread throughout his whole little body and put him into multisystem organ failure with five of his organ systems failing at once.  He underwent countless surgeries including the removal of his spleen.  He also had many transfusions. To this day Skyler has had a total of 186 blood and platelet transfusions.  I was told one night that I would most likely have to say my goodbyes.  That he probably wasnt going to make it.  But Skyler did what he does best and surprised everyone by beating the odds and surviving. 

It has now been over two years and Skyler is still here with us and fighting.  He is a true superhero in every sense of the word.  He has had to overcome many obsticles including learning how to walk again and hear with the use of hearing aids due to hearing loss from his medications.  He still has a long road ahead of him with a year left of chemotherapy treatments, but I know he will continue to fight with the same courage and strength that he has shown since the beginning!

This video is a MUST see!  Just watch all this amazing child has been though.  

Oh, how we love you styler!